Within academia today, the Calls For Papers (CFP) in humanities areas are still as hilariously pomo as they were in the early ’90s. It’s still difficult to tell apart a real pomo abstract vs. something spit out by the Postmodern Generator (simply refresh the page for a new pomo abstract.) I’ll periodically post a random CFP here, just for comic value. For today, we have:
trans* : Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference, Keynote José Muñoz, October 18, 2013
3rd Annual Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference
Tufts University
October 18, 2013
Keynote: José Muñoz
In the Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway famously suggests, “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras.” Chimeras are amalgams, hybrid beings that stand both in and between disparate identities. They are bodies in transit; they are transforming and potentially transformative bodies. At a contemporary moment in which identity politics have material, potentially violent, effects on bodies and subjects, the mobile and undecided limits of what Judith Butler terms the “recognizably human” pose an especially pressing set of questions. This year’s conference theme takes up the questions of the transnational, the transsexual, the transhistorical, and other states of being in trans*.
We solicit papers from all areas of the humanities on being suspended between or moving across two states of being. Some questions of interest include: What are historical moments of fissure at which trans* figures emerge? How might the trans* figure transfigure structures of identity and power? In what ways are identities and bodies transfixed? What constitutes an act of transgression? How do new technologies translate and transform identities?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
– Citizenship and transnationalism
– Translation and transposition
– Technology and the mechanical
– Queer bodies and identity politics
– Temporality and historiography
– Intersectionality and interdisciplinarity
Please send abstracts of 250 words or less to tuftsgradhumanitiesconference@gmail.com by June 15, 2013.
